During today's testimony in front of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot on Monday, the panel heard about former Trump aides and legal professionals who purportedly tried to tell the former president that his claims of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election were bogus -- a group of people branded as "Team Normal" by Trump spokesperson Jason Miller.
Among those included in "Team Normal" is former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. But according to The Bulwark's Tim Miller, Stepien "spent 5 years watching Donald Trump’s cruelty, pathological duplicity, irrationality, narcissistic personality disorder, buffoonery, and criminality."
"After that half-decade of evidence, this 'professional' decided to accept a role as the campaign manager for Trump’s flagging re-election campaign," Miller writes.
Miller says that Stepien must have known that Trump had no plans of leaving office in the event that he lost. "And yet on election night 2020, as this fate was coming to pass, Bill Stepien testified that he advised the president to give a measured statement about how it’s 'too early to tell,'" Miller writes. "He wanted Trump to be dignified about how the team was 'proud of the race we ran' and close by offering that he would have 'more to say' after the votes came in."
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According to Miller, Stepien's failure to resign in protest, or to go to the press to tell them how "deluded" Trump was, or to testify against Trump during his impeachment hearings just shows that "Team Normal" wasn’t functionally any different from the “Ultra-Krakens.”
"They just didn’t want to get their hands dirty. They had professional reputations to keep," writes Miller.
The committee had planned to hear in-person testimony from Stepien but he canceled an hour before the hearing after his wife went into labor.
Trump started pushing what came to be known as his "Big Lie" around 2:30 am on November 4, 2020, making baseless allegations of fraud and prematurely declaring victory on the night of an election he ultimately lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes.
Former attorney General Bill Barr told the committee in previously unseen video testimony that Trump claimed there was major fraud underway "right out of the box on election night... before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence."
The committee says that initial claim grew quickly into a conspiracy to cling to power by Trump and his inner circle -- and a fundraising campaign that raised $250 million between election night and the insurrection.
The panel hopes to demonstrate that the clips from Stepien, Barr and others prove Trump should have known that what he was being told by his allies wasn't true.
With additional reporting by AFP